According to the Evidence (10 page)

‘So a lawyer can shop around cherry-picking expert opinions until he finds one that suits him?' demanded Siân. She was always ready to crusade for the correct approach. Her father was a shop steward in a local foundry and the whole family were staunchly socialist in outlook.

Richard nodded. ‘That happens, and it's quite legal. Though there has been talk of making the defence admit they've done that and to disclose what the unfavourable opinions were. But so far it hasn't become law.'

Angela had come back into the room and heard the last exchange. ‘It's even much more common in America,' she said. ‘But of course there they even spend weeks picking a jury, to get the ones they think might be most sympathetic to their client!'

Siân muttered something about ‘And they call it justice!' as she went back to her bench to start work again.

‘Do you think you'll find anything useful in the literature?' Angela asked her partner.

‘I'll have a good look in the Bristol university library,' he replied. Richard had a contract to give twenty lectures a year to medical students there, which gave him access to the library. ‘I've got this niggling memory of seeing something about potassium after death. I think it was from Germany.'

‘Do they have all the forensic journals in Bristol?'

‘I'm not sure – if not, I'll go down to Cardiff and look in the Home Office lab; they should have some. And then try the medical school library there. I'm an old student, so they should let me in.'

As he went back to his room, Angela decided she admired his tenacity and strength of purpose. She hoped he hadn't read too much into the little peck she gave him on the stairs the previous evening, but he had been such good company at dinner. She found that she was glad she had him as a colleague and friend.

Next day, while Richard Pryor was sitting in his car on the Beachley–Aust ferry, crossing the Severn Estuary on his way to Bristol, Arthur Crippen was in a meeting with his superiors.

The Mid-Wales Constabulary had been formed only a few years earlier by amalgamating three county forces, and now its headquarters were in Newtown, right in the middle of Wales.

He had travelled up from Brecon with his DCI Joe Paget to discuss the Ty Croes case with Detective Chief Superintendent Claude Morris, the head of the CID.

‘We're getting nowhere at all so far, sir,' announced Paget. Crippen thought the ‘we' was a bit rich, as the chief inspector had had virtually nothing to do with the matter and knew only what Arthur had told him about it.

The DCS slumped behind his desk, tapping on his blotter with the end of a pencil. He was a fat man, nearing retirement, like Crippen, and was keen on having a quiet life for the next couple of years.

‘So you think it has to be an inside job?' he grunted.

Paget deferred to his DI for an answer, and Crippen leaned forward over his cup of tasteless canteen coffee.

‘I can't see it being anything else, sir. It's not a casual assault by some chancer trying to steal something. There's no one else around there apart from those who live or work on the farm.'

The portly DCS considered this for a moment, still tapping his pencil. ‘So we've got two farmers, their wives and a father?'

‘And there's this young chap you told me about, Arthur,' chipped in Paget, just to show that he was on the ball.

The DI shrugged. ‘Can't see him involved, though he admitted he hated the dead man's guts.'

‘I wouldn't write him off,' advised Morris. He had been a good detective before he was kicked upstairs to his armchair job, and his opinion was still worth listening to. ‘Is this Shane boy big enough to have done it?'

Arthur nodded, albeit reluctantly. ‘He's a strong lad, admittedly. And the deceased was a scrawny sort of fellow. It's just that I can't see this boy having enough brains to think out a complicated scheme like that.'

Claude Morris ruffled the pages of the report on his desk.

‘It's a bloody funny way to commit a murder,' he grumbled. ‘Are we absolutely sure that it's not some bizarre kind of accident or suicide? We'd look right fools if we start a homicide investigation and then discover there wasn't one.'

‘The pathologist was quite definite about it – and I saw the injuries he was relying on with my own eyes.'

The DCS still looked dubious. ‘This Dr Pryor – I'd never heard of him. He's not the regular Home Office fellow, is he?'

Joe Paget, who always read all the bumf that was sent around by headquarters, answered this time. ‘There was a circular from the Home Office some time ago. He was put on their list a few months back, with a sort of roving commission to fill in wherever he was needed. Seems he was a pathologist in the army and in Singapore – had a lot of experience.'

‘And the forensic lab did their stuff, I see. What came out of that?'

Crippen again took up the baton. ‘The doctor found some fibres on his neck which the lab said corresponded with some that were stuck on the hook of an engine hoist – and they matched some rope that was lying around the barn, so the hanging part has to be accepted.'

‘But that was a cover-up for a previous throttling?'

‘So it has to be a murder, sir,' confirmed Paget. ‘No other way he could end up under a tractor wheel. The doctor said he must have been hanging for some hours before that, by the settling of blood in his legs.'

‘He was a heavy drinker, so you say. Was he pissed when all this happened?'

‘Not all that much. He had the equivalent of a few pints in him, though again the doctor says it depends on when he last had a drink and at what time he died,' said Crippen.

‘Anything in his background at all?'

Joe Paget shook his head. His only contribution to the investigation so far had been in snooping around Brecon. ‘He was a Londoner originally. We traced his family through army records. Parents long dead, no other relatives found. He lived in a couple of scruffy rented rooms in Brecon. Plenty of empty bottles, betting slips and a few girlie magazines, that's all.'

‘No known associates? Any hard men he owes money to?'

Paget turned up his hands appealingly. ‘Damn all, sir. We'll keep on looking, but I think Arthur's right. It has to be someone at Ty Croes.'

Morris threw his pencil down on the desk. ‘So what do we do now? Are we going to call in the Yard? If so, we've got to get a move on.'

For many years, small police forces had been able to call on Scotland Yard for assistance, who would send a detective superintendent down to offer their expert help. This had to be done within a week, otherwise financial charges would be imposed. Most provincial police forces, especially the larger ones, made it a point of honour not to call in the Yard, feeling it was a slur on their own abilities. DI Crippen was certainly in this category.

‘Oh, not the bloody Yard, sir! We don't want them throwing their weight about down here. There's nothing they can do that we can't.'

His chief nodded gravely, his double chin bobbing. ‘I'm not keen myself, but it's up to the Chief Constable, as he'll have the press and the Watch Committee on his back before long. Thankfully, few people seem to have got wind of this yet, but it can't stay under wraps forever.'

They kicked the problem around for a further half-hour without coming to much of a conclusion. Arthur Crippen's last contribution seemed the only way forward for the moment.

‘It's got to be someone at that damned farm. I'll go back there and worry the life out of them until something breaks, sir!'

SEVEN

B
y the time Richard Pryor returned to Tintern from Bristol, both Moira and Siân had left for the day. He drove his Humber up into the yard at the back of Garth House and parked it in the coach house, alongside Angela's little white Renault 4CV.

He took his old briefcase from the back of the car and began walking towards the back door, but he was accosted by a figure coming down from the garden behind. It was Jimmy Jenkins, their gardener and odd-job man, who sometimes added being their driver to his accomplishments. Jimmy had been inherited with the house, as he had been employed by Aunt Gladys for years and when Richard took over he seemed to have continued in his job by default.

A well-known character in the area, Jimmy was about fifty, with a weather-beaten face decorated by a broken nose and a set of crooked, tobacco-stained teeth. He always seemed to have half a Woodbine stuck to his lower lip, and Richard could never remember seeing him smoking a whole cigarette. His bristly grey hair was surmounted by a greasy cap perched over one eye – Jimmy habitually wore thick flannel shirts, over which were the braces that held up his corduroy trousers.

‘I've run the cultivator over your patch again, doctor,' he announced in an accent from the Forest of Dean, which lay just across the river. ‘Needs doing once more before you puts in them fancy plants. Best do it soon, before the cold weather comes.'

The ‘patch' that he rather sarcastically referred to was a quarter of an acre of the four acres of land that rose up the hill behind Garth House – and the ‘fancy plants' were vines that Richard had ordered from a distant nursery. He had ambitions to start a small vineyard on the south-facing slope, as the climate of the sheltered Wye Valley was mild. Jimmy was contemptuous of the idea, trying to persuade his boss to grow strawberries instead, but Richard was adamant, even though he knew virtually nothing about horticulture.

They spoke about his pet project for a few minutes before Richard could escape. ‘I've got to go to Cardiff in the morning, so could you give the car a wash tonight?'

He declined Jimmy's offer to drive him there, and as the man went off to fix up the hosepipe he went into the house.

Angela was still at her bench, finishing off a batch of paternity tests. Richard put his head around the laboratory door to let her know that he was back.

‘Did you find anything useful in Bristol?' she asked, looking up with a pipette hovering over a rack of small tubes.

He hefted his document case to show her, a battered crocodile-skin bag that he had bought years ago in Ceylon.

‘I think so, but I'd like your opinion on it this evening. I'm going down to the library in Cardiff tomorrow to see if I can dig out anything else.'

She nodded as she pulled another rack towards her.

‘Fine. We'll talk about it after supper.'

He went off to his room down the passage and spent half an hour reading the mail and checking some reports that Moira had typed that day on post-mortems he had done at Chepstow and Monmouth. Then he pulled down a couple of textbooks from his shelves and began pursuing some of the matters that he had discovered in the medical school library in Bristol.

Eventually, his partner banged on his door and called out ‘Supper!' to call him into the kitchen. Here Moira had laid out two places on the big table and left a casserole for them in the warming oven of the Aga. Originally, she had been employed to do basic housekeeping, some cooking and a little typing, but as the business had increased, Moira had become overburdened. Now a buxom woman from the village came in for two hours each day to clean and make beds, while Moira made lunch and left them something each evening for supper. It was great improvement on the early days, when Richard and Angela virtually camped out in the old house, eating out of tins.

Only the two partners took meals, as figure-conscious Siân always brought sandwiches, an apple and a bottle of Tizer, while Moira herself went home at midday to feed her dog. As Pryor sat down in anticipation of one of Moira's casseroles, for she was an excellent cook, Angela opened a tin of Heinz oxtail soup and warmed it for their first course. When she first came to Garth House, she was adamant that she was not going to be involved in any domesticity, but her resolve had slipped a little and now she was prepared to do a few things, but she drew the line at proper cooking and cleaning.

They finished up with a fruit salad and local cream, which Moira had left for them in the old Kelvin refrigerator, then Richard made coffee, his contribution to the domestic scene. He took this into the staffroom next door, and the pair settled down on each side of the low table.

‘So what have you got from your ferreting around in Bristol?' she asked.

He delved into his briefcase and brought out some loose papers and a foolscap legal pad, several pages of which were covered with his handwriting.

‘I wish they had one of those new copying machines in their library,' he complained. ‘I had to write everything out longhand.'

He slid the papers across the table and settled back with his coffee to wait for her to digest the contents. When Angela had looked through the first couple of pages, she looked up at him.

‘Can you prove this beyond reasonable doubt?' she asked soberly, using the standard for evidence that applied in criminal cases. In civil matters, only the ‘balance of probabilities' was needed, but they both knew that this would not be sufficient in a murder trial.

Richard shrugged. ‘All I can do is offer the conclusions of this chap who did the research. The other stuff you have there is watertight, as it's been accepted fact for years.'

He watched her intently as she went back to her reading. Angela was a very intelligent woman whose opinion he valued highly. With an honours degree and a doctorate in a biological science, and years of experience in its forensic applications, she would be able to appreciate the significance of the material at least as well as he could with his medical training.

Her coffee neglected, her head was bent over the papers, a swathe of dark brown hair falling over her face. Richard experienced a wave of respect tinged with affection for her. Though there had been no repetition or even reference to the momentary episode on the stairs the other evening, he felt that their relationship had somehow warmed and that they felt more comfortable with each other. When he first met her and, indeed, even when she came to take up residence in Garth House, he found her manner rather cool, showing him a purely professional face. Now she felt more like a sister or an attractive cousin, and he briefly wondered if it would ever go further. His daydreaming was interrupted when she dropped the papers back on to the table and took up her now lukewarm coffee.